Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote
shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on
account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this
article by appropriate legislation.

Affirmative Interpretation

In its initial appraisals of this amendment the Court appeared disposed
to emphasize only its purely negative aspects. "The Fifteenth
Amendment," it announced, did "not confer the right * * * [to vote] upon
any one," but merely "invested the citizens of the United States with a
new constitutional right which is * * * exemption from discrimination in
the exercise of the elective franchise on account of race, color, or
previous condition of servitude."[1] Within less than ten years,
however, in Ex parte Yarbrough,[2] the Court ventured to read into the
amendment an affirmative as well as a negative purpose. Conceding "that
this article" had originally been construed as giving "no affirmative
right to the colored man to vote," and as having been "designed
primarily to prevent discrimination against him," Justice Miller, in
behalf of his colleagues, disclosed their present ability "to see that
under some circumstances it may operate as the immediate source of a
right to vote. In all cases where the former slave-holding States had
not removed from their Constitutions the words 'white man' as a
qualification for voting, this provision did, in effect, confer on him
the right to vote, because, * * *, it annulled the discriminating word
_white_, and thus left him in the enjoyment of the same right as white
persons. And such would be the effect of any future constitutional
provision of a State which should give the right of voting exclusively
to white people, * * *"

Negative Application; the "Grandfather Clause"

The subsequent history of the Fifteenth Amendment has been largely a
record of belated judicial condemnation of various attempts by States to
disfranchise the Negro either overtly through statutory enactment, or
covertly through inequitable administration of their electoral laws or
by toleration of discriminatory membership practices of political
parties. Of several devices which have been voided, one of the first to
be held unconstitutional was the "grandfather clause." Without expressly
disfranchising the Negro, but with a view to facilitating the permanent
placement of white residents on the vo